Free Market Money

Free market money is about market alternatives to government fiat fraud.

22 April 2009

Night is falling - light many candles

There is an old saying that it is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness. Night is falling in America. The government is increasingly authoritarian, and increasingly bold about stealing property, thwarting individual liberty, occupying foreign countries, massacring women and children. Concentration camps are not a new thing in this country.

If it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, how much better still to light many candles? Why have a single point of failure, when you can have more light and greater redundancy with many candles?

What sort of candles? I'm not talking about a brushfire, or a bunch of rampaging villagers with torches, nor about burning down buildings. Instead, I'm talking about ten million individuals acting as sovereigns instead of slaves. I'm talking about engaging in trade and commerce using contemporary cryptographic protocols so what you buy and sell is nobody's business but your own.

Alongside Night is a whole new day. The civilisation which reached its peak in 1969, which put men on the Moon and sent passengers faster than the speed of sound to their destinations, no longer does those things. It is falling into decay, it has become corrupt, and the miserable little men and women who seek only power for themselves have screwed things up, badly.

Is it possible to reform the existing system by working within it? I don't know. I do know that the campaign finance reform laws have protected incumbents, evil, vicious, hateful incumbents like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid who have never seen anything wrong with domestic wiretaps, massacres of foreigners in their villages, huge defense contracts, war, bloodshed, torture, and the evisceration of freedom.

If it is possible, then groups like the Boston Tea Party should find good candidates and support them. If it is possible to fix the system while it is going rapidly down the drain, great.

But if it is not, then you should be prepared for alternatives. You should think about how to disconnect from the grid, now, while it is a choice. If contemporary civilisation collapsed tomorrow, how would you get electricity? Water? Fuel? Internet connectivity?

It is possible to provide all these things with centralisation, corruption, and the inefficiencies that come with huge bureaucracies. But it is also possible to get the same objectives using decentralised systems, using individual participation or small networks, in ways that enhance your privacy instead of compromising it.

That, to me, is what "Alongside Night" is all about. That's why I've dedicated my career to its success.